The UN has started to shift gears, as if beyond it’s ostensibly benevolent façade lies another layer of power and military bureaucracy within which the security council can suddenly act to push through radical and unprecedented military resolutions. Their mandate is now clear: restore order at all costs and maintain stability in nations advanced enough to be deemed globally significant. The brutality of survivalism is already rearing its ugly head, I fear.

Tomorrow, leading academics, astronomers, astrophysicists, engineers and experts are gathering at a global symposium in Geneva. The group will constitute a new special UN Advisory Committee and contains representatives from all the worlds’ major space agencies. Their declaration is inevitably to be seen as the official line on the comet known to us all, in the unimaginative and detached astronomical lexicon, as C/2064U.

C/2064U…

Our collective Death?

My Salvation?

I feel we are reaching the apex of information storm and through the swirling rain and whipping winds of our struggle with our new reality, an image is starting to form in the distance. Perhaps it is the notion of salvation. Perhaps it is something worse. Salvation means hope and hope means idealism and idealism, in these galvanising end-days, means fundamentalism.

All of this though, all this panic and fear and dread, this sealed fate, give me more cause than ever to press on and complete the first prototype of the GODD Module. I must not allow myself to become swept along by the vile current of radicalism. I must hold my own council and make her proud.

That is what I will take from this. Strength and resolve not fear and alarm.

This is what I pledge to do; to prove my theory once and for all. And not through the pages of some esoteric academic journal, but through the evidential process of experimentation. Through the GODD Module.

To summarise the findings of this symposium and its delegates the following three main tenants are those which, we have decreed as irrefutably true and do not therefore warrant further investigation through unnecessary funding or allocation of vital civil or private resources. For the purposes of mass consumption and public information dissemination, this symposium and its delegates have summarised their three main findings as follows:

Firstly, at its current trajectory and speed and unimpeded by the emergence of unforeseeable gravitational or kinetic influences, the comet C/2064U will impact the Earth in five years, two months, four days, six hours and fifteen minutes. Using this timescale impact will occur some two hundred kilometers off the south west coast of Cuba at 09.15 local time on Friday 17th January 2070 (08.15 EST, 14.15 GMT).

Secondly, given the comet C/2064U's current speed, size, mass, and probable composition, it is the consensus of this symposium and its delegates that no existing technology currently available or viably engineerable within the aforementioned time scale, can avert impact, given that the only two theoretical methods of planetary defence available to our global civilisation are the 'destroy' or 'divert' models.

With regard to the 'destroy' model, it is the consensus of this symposium and its delegates that any attempt to obliterate the comet C/2064U using ground or space based nuclear weaponry (technology not currently permitted under the clauses of the Nuclear Limitation Treaty of 2031 and the Large Gigaton De-scaling Developmental Framework of 2046) would produce an unacceptably high risk of breaking the comet's rocky core into several hundred smaller stellar objects. Many of these smaller rock and ice fragments would almost certainly remain on a collision course with the Earth and would survive entry into the atmosphere, leading to a comparable, if not more catastrophic impact event.

With regard to the 'divert' model, it is the consensus of this symposium and its delegates the amount of energy needed to produce a big enough 'shunt' or 'push' to sufficiently divert the comet C/2064U's trajectory this close to impact (whether it be through nuclear, kinetic or other more theoretical means) is completely untenable given current technological and engineering limitations and the widespread de-nuclearisation of nation state arsenals under the aforementioned treaties.

Thirdly, it is the consensus of this symposium and its delegates that no life on Earth would survive the immediate aftermath of an impact event caused by the comet C/2064U, either as a singular non periodical comet or or in the various comet fragments and distributions of a multiple impact event (as resultant from the 'destroy' model of planetary defence previously stated.)

It is therefore the opinion of this symposium and its delegates that comet C/2064U be officially categorized as a Mass Extinction Event by the UN and that the security council call an emergency summit of all member states with the express intention of passing into international law a mandate to bring the space agencies of our planet's nations into line under the strategic and operational leadership of a singular international executive body, whilst maintaining necessary and expedient individual nation state administration and internal regulations.

It is therefore the inevitable and regrettable conclusion of this symposium and its delegates that the UN and its member states bring about a programme of mass planetary evacuation to the nearest habitable celestial body in our solar system; this being the planet Mars.

We commit this declaration to the legislature of the United Nations Security Council on behalf of the scientific community of the world, as represented here by the this symposium and its delegates.13th November 2064Geneva Delegation

I have decided to keep a personal journal, so I can keep a record of these events that have been imposed upon us by the random hand of fate and this bleak comet that seals all our fates and now tars every day with its shadow hanging over us, unseen but easily detected by our telescopes in the far flung reaches of our solar system, like an icy reaper upon his cosmic horse.

The first shadows of our blackest days were nothing more than binary whispers, a rumour here, a speculation there and the usual colloquial cynicism that always echo around the edges of such grandiose conspiracies on the webworks and serpentine freeways of the net. Oh, if only that were to have been the end of things. But alas, deep within the web’s forums and highways, the ghosts began to take on a more solid shape, as if morphing into the cold flesh of a horrible truth, whatever its hideous form would turn out to be. There was such a gentle breeze before the cyclone; such fine and fickle droplets of rain before the storm, before this slow and horrible decent into anarchy and fear.

Soon enough the experts began to coalesce on a singular truth and the dusts of misinformation slowly parted. Then there it was upon us. It was no longer an interesting aside to a friend or colleague, or a low down news item on the national network; it was on every channel, on every news site, on every radio stream: revealed, the cold flesh of our demon, a vile wretched truth, this end of ends.

It was early July when I remember the panic start to take hold and spread. Perhaps it was a little before that but that was when it seemed to become palpable. Real.

For a time there was nothing to do but watch the news come in. Many continued to doubt. Many simply refused to believe it and ranted and screamed at the government as if they had concocted the whole sorry mess for some unknown and inevitably malevolent agenda. But even the doubters lost their faith in conspiracies, as if the power of the planet’s collective dread was a force to compelling to ignore, compelling them to look to the heavens; to the seed of their demise; to feel the fear and helplessness begin to course like the onset of some vile and irreversible poison in the blood, in the gut.

And an eerie calm descended upon the earth like a thin veil, until finally, cracked and brittle, it fell to pieces around the feet of humanity.

I will never forget those first few weeks, the noise of collective dread, of societies breaking down. Shared fear on this scale is deafening to the senses when it is allowed the space to writhe.

And so we at the Facility sat, we watched, we listened. We watched the world come to life in a riotous frenzy of undirected anger and confusion, a maelstrom of futility like a species-wide death throw. For those of us too paralysed by fear, those of us whose lives have hence been buffered enough by our decadent untroubled lifestyles to have never had the need to reach for the rifle or the bomb, we could only sit, watch, listen.

We avoided the demonstrations and the tear gas and the rioting and simply tried to take it all in.

The hysteria is like an epidemic. It is as if the social fabric of human civilisation is suddenly beginning to tear apart at the seams.

Some even seemed to even doubt their own sanity, as if the premise of their species seemingly arbitrary and indiscriminate destruction by something as inauspicious as a huge lump of rock and ice hurtling through space, was so implausible that it became almost incomprehensible; thus somehow the culmination of a severe mental breakdown or catatonic state. They say that in those first weeks the intake of the psych wards and asylums burgeoned to near breaking point.

Doomsayers and preachers of all faiths and creeds now fill the social spaces of this city and beyond no doubt the earth’s cities and towns are full of them, shouting their salvations to those who will stop to listen. But few do. They say if we survive this, it will signal the end of religion, the ushering of a new era. The New Secular.

For me these notions seem irrelevant in the face of such an unprecedented event (irreverent to many as well, I am sure – although not to me, being a man as I am of a scientific disposition and trade, I cannot, and do not, take solace in an afterlife or a omnipotent deity). But believer or non-believer, comet or hand of god, it is a matter of no debate that we are all now inexorably tied to each other in the rising tide of this our bitter global cataclysm. If we can survive it, if any of us can survive it, then it is for them to define any uncertain era that follows this.

But for now, for me, for here, it is as if every sleepless night has become just a prelude to another fear-riddled day.

Finally deployment to the Eastern Front has been announced. We leave 05.00 8th Jan. Events these past three years since the comet have been fast and I don't think anyone really has had time to take stock of what is really going on. Sometimes the speed things are moving really frightens me. I don't mind admitting that to you. A lot of people are going to die but it is my strong conviction that we are on the right side and that is all that really matters when it comes down to it.

I am leaving my wife and my baby boy and I know I may not return but stopping this country from falling into the hands of the Planetary Alliance is more important than anything now. I don't say this lightly and I am afraid to die but if we lose here then all of Western Europe will become the territory of the PA and the UWA and their backward and cowardly policies will spread and threaten to pull the entire human race down with them. If we can get a foothold back into Europe though then the Exodus Programme will be able to regain its rightful assets and our chances of survival will be greatly improved. If France falls then England will become the last bastion of sanity in Europe. For this reason alone we have no other option but to take the fight to them.

And so in less than 72 hours our entire regiment will begin its tour of duty in Europe and I and my brothers will be in Paris, the last free city on mainland Europe. I am both excited and frightened and desperate to be rid of all this waiting. That is what I hate the most; the waiting. Looks like it's finally coming to an end though. Crunch time.

They say the United World Army's war machine is running out of steam and with the high ranking officers of the former European powers fleeing to the UK and the US, as well as China and its sattelites, they lack any credible military strategy. Some reports even talk of dissention growing amongst its ranks. If this is true then maybe this will all be over by the spring and the revolution will have failed. I pray every day with all my that this is true.

What is the Hades Engine?

Set during the last years of terrestrial mankind on Earth and the far flung future of a war savaged Martian civilisation descended from a common colonial ancestry, the Hades Engine charts mankind's eternal struggle to attain godliness at any cost.

It is 2064 and the comet C/2064U races towards the earth. At the size of a small city it is deemed by the international bodies and scientific symposia of the United Nations to be indivertible, wholly indestructible and inherently inevitable. In the face of this approaching cataclysm a bloody and brutal rift emerges amongst humanity.

As the Arcs of the Exodus leave Earth orbit and the Great Subterranean Cities are constructed under the battlefields of Eurasia one man struggles to complete his life's work and realise a dream. His quest is for the ultimate panacea, a power that will change the human race forever. Pursued and hounded by the authorities on both sides of Earth's last war, his quest for the oldest and most elusive of all of man’s desires will lead him to the very heart of a hidden and archaic power and a truth that will change everything.

Half a millennia later the warring factions of Mars collide on the plains of Hellas and Elysium under the batteries of the new Geo-Synchs. Awash in a sea of plasma and blood the Martian colonists have turned to the technologies of industrial clone farming and genetic military engineering to create a new and more compliant type of soldier for their wars. But now the clones have begun to break away and form their own autonomous settlements. These independent colonies now hold the key to victory for a desperate Emperor who will stop at nothing to secure the future for his people and crush the separatists that first rose against him nearly half a millennia ago.

Meanwhile around the barren icy rock of humanity’s ancestral home a satellite communication is lost and a science vessel is missing. As the Imperial Frigate Archangel heads out to head off a suspected enemy incursion on the surface of the long dead planet, what they find there will affect far more than their own war, it will change humanity's understanding of the universe for ever.